Wednesday, 28 December 2011

Here is my brilliant idea: the BBC should run episodes of Cabin Pressure on a constant loop to keep up national morale through the economic gloom. It is so funny, so spectacularly well-written, so gloriously acted, especially by the mordant Roger Allam, that it deserves a place as a national monument.

For those of you who can get the iPlayer, there is a special Christmas episode here:

Saturday, 24 December 2011

I just heard someone say this about Peter Lawford, on a radio trailer for a programme about him:

'He was tall, ridiculously good-looking, and British, without being goofy about it.'

The speaker was an American. I love the idea of managing to be British without being goofy about it. What can it mean? What form would the goofiness take? Endless quoting of PG Wodehouse? Ostentatious drinking of tea? Constant renderings of Land of Hope and Glory? An obsessive drive to understatement? The breeding of bulldogs?

I'm trying to think of the most British thing ever. What runs into my mind, carrying a Union flag, is the habit of Ordinary Decent Britons to say 'Oh, you know, not too bad,' when asked how they are. This usually means: the dog died, I lost all my money in a Ponzi scheme, my other half has just run off with my best friend, and the roof is leaking. But you know, not too bad.

Friday, 23 December 2011

The very beautiful blog A Gift-Wrapped Life has some delightful Christmas pictures up, but for some reason the one I loved most was not really Christmassy at all. It's just a delightful horse picture, and I can't get enough of those.

Make the incredible Military Wives number one for Christmas. I can't listen to this song without feeling a bit teary, and keenly aware of my own luck. I have no beloved in mortal danger; these women do. If I can say this without sounding too sentimental: I salute them. And I salute the lovely Gareth Malone for seeing their promise, and believing in it. It's a real good news story for Christmas.

You can buy the single in various ways: shop, internet, or through iTunes.

My father died this year. As it comes up to Christmas, I am thinking of him and missing him a lot. This morning, as I was noodling about on the internet, I found this quotation, which seems just perfect to me.

'Bereavement is the deepest initiation into the mysteries of human life, an initiation more searching and profound than even happy love.'

Brendan O'Neill has a thoughtful take on Hitchens, Orwell, and the cavalier use of the word fascism in today's Telegraph Online.

Funnily enough, I had been thinking about this exact thing over the weekend. I was talking to a charming, interesting person, sophisticated and funny. I mentioned something in passing about Barack Obama. Sudden, alarmed face: 'Oh,' the person said, in horror, 'but he's a socialist.'

I'm afraid I was so astonished that I was not quite polite. 'No, he's not,' I said, with some heat.

Calling Barack Obama a socialist is like calling my dog a goat. It's demonstrably, provably incorrect. I never saw a man with less desire to nationalise the means of production. The thing is, most people who throw that word around have no idea what it actually means. It has become a catch-all for vaguely Left, or, more pertinently, not Right. So it is with fascism, as O'Neill points out: this is the word that some leftists use to mean not very nice.

I believe in accuracy in language. Language matters. That is why, with each passing year, I love Orwell more and more.

Thursday, 15 December 2011

I am not feeling very worldly today. There is no news; current affairs go on without me. So I read a poem about hills, instead.

A Spell Before Winter, by Howard Nemerov.

After the red leaf and the gold have gone,
Brought down by the wind, then by hammering rain
Bruised and discolored, when October's flame
Goes blue to guttering in the cusp, this land
Sinks deeper into silence, darker into shade.
There is a knowledge in the look of things,
The old hills hunch before the north wind blows.
Now I can see certain simplicities
In the darkening rust and tarnish of the time,
And say over the certain simplicities,
The running water and the standing stone,
The yellow haze of the willow and the black
Smoke of the elm, the silver, silent light
Where suddenly, readying toward nightfall,
The sumac's candelabrum darkly flames.
And I speak to you now with the land's voice,
It is the cold, wild land that says to you
A knowledge glimmers in the sleep of things:
The old hills hunch before the north wind blows.

And a picture, of my very own hills, in their glimmering winter light:

There is a thought-provoking piece from John Harris about Europe in The Guardian. I don't agree with all of it, but as I try to negotiate the mazy complications of the Euromess, I am gathering all opinions and facts that I can. It's worth reading the comments too, as the more moderate of them present a fascinating collage of arguments for and against. That's why I say: Euromess. Not because I am against the European ideal, but because the state of the Euro, the sovereign debt crisis, the endless debate are all so massively complicated now that it is almost impossible to draw any clear conclusions.

The joke dog in the piece is a Border Collie called Dash. I idly flipped that into the Google, looking for a picture to illustrate this post. Amazingly, there actually is a very handsome real Border Collie, actually called Dash, posted on a dog forum by someone called The Mutts' Mum. He's an absolute beauty:

'Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.'

From Moby Dick.

I am ashamed to say I have never read Moby Dick. I never much fancied the idea of the whole man against whale thing. But I have a fierce love and admiration for a writer who can turn the phrase 'a damp, drizzly November in my soul'. So now Mr Melville is number one on my reading list.

Michael White at The Guardian is one of my very favourite political commentators. He is of the liberal left, but not at all tribal, so he can see clearly flaws in his own side, and strengths in the other. He has also been around for a very long time, so he has that wonderful seasoned sense of political history that comes with experience. He has counted them in, and he has counted them out. He also has absolutely no need for point-scoring; he is too measured for that. He observes, wryly and drily, and makes a gentle prediction or two along the way, but he does not run about setting his hair on fire. Whenever I read him, I feel better.

His take today on the Coalition and the Eurocrisis is one of his best and well worth a read. It contains the perfectly wonderful observation on Paddy Ashdown that he can 'believe six impossible things before lunch, three of them pretty smart'.

Sunday, 11 December 2011

Have patience with all things, but chiefly have patience with yourself. Do not lose courage in considering your own imperfections but instantly set about remedying them - every day begin the task anew.

Hidden away in the dusty curate's egg that is Radio Four Extra is easily the loveliest thing currently on the BBC. It is the late Alan Coren, reading a selection of his own columns. They are quite, quite brilliant. I'm not sure I really ever took in what a good writer he was. There is no one doing what he could do now. There is rather a sweet moment when the continuity announcer introduces the programmes, and says: the late, and very much missed Alan Coren. I can see now why he is so missed.

Anyway, if you have the BBC iPlayer, you can find the loveliness here.

Rather wonderful old picture of Coren with John Cleese; photographer unknown.

I don't know how I got there, but I stumbled upon the Oxford English Dictionary's list of common differences between American and British English. I find it both enchanting, and funny. I like to think I know quite a lot about American culture, but I discover there are things I did not know at all. Are there really no zebra crossings in America? And I love the choice of terms. Did we really need to know that British people speak of boob tubes, whilst our American cousins talk of tube tops? Who has even worn a boob tube in the last twenty years?

But easily, easily my favourite is:
British English - brawn (food) - American English - headcheese.
I think the compilers were just having a naughty little joke with that one.

Could not find an appropriate photograph to illustrate this, apart from some very pedestrian shots of American and British flags, so here is a nice picture of an old Fowler's advertisement instead. (British English: treacle; American English: molasses.)

Friday, 9 December 2011

It's rather long, and it's a month old, but it could not be more interesting or relevant.

It's an interview with John Kay of the FT, by Polly Curtis at The Guardian, originally posted on her blog. She is asking him about the consequences for Britain if the Euro were to collapse. This is what he said:

There is a desperate anxiety in the financial community to say that unless governments give us lots of money and pay off our debts the world will come to an end - without being very specific about how it comes to an end. We are enthralled to the financial community as we were in 2007 and 2008. They are saying if you don't give us loads of money we will bring the world as you know it crashing down around your ears. To some degree they can do it, it's not an empty threat.

As far as an ordinary British business is concerned if the eurozone collapses new currencies are created and some go up and some go down. That's what happens. But the real impact is what happens in the financial sector and how that impinges on them. That's the story of 2007/08. It was the knock on consequences if you couldn't get a loan from your bank rather than a crisis in America. As in 2007-08 this is a financial sector problem and that sector will work very hard to make it into a problem for the rest of us one way or another. Until we tackle that culture, it will keep reoccurring.

For absolutely no good reason, I have decided to illustrate this with a photograph of men rowing a boat during the 1953 floods in Harwich, photographer sadly unknown:

From the German newspaper, Der Spiegel, after David Cameron said no to the latest EU deal.

I always like a picture to go with each post. For this one, I thought I'd try and find a nice waving goodbye shot. I stumbled upon this, which is a most poignant illustration of Goodbye, England. It is the crew of the Endurance, in 1916, waving as the lifeboat which is their only hope of salvation sets out on its 800 mile journey to South Georgia:

I have been a tiny bit Eurosceptical on the main blog today. (I used to be a tremendous Europhile; now I feel very ambivalent indeed. I cannot tell if this is a sensible reaction to current events, or the onset of grumpy middle age.) Anyway, in the interests of balance, here is a funny and salutary view from the other side:

This one is long, and very tragic, but so awfully fascinating that you will read to the end with your breath held. It's about the crash of Air France Flight 447, which fell out of the sky into the Atlantic two years ago. No one knew why. The cause remained a mystery and a speculation. Now, they have found the black boxes, and the last minutes of the flight can be pieced together. It is very sad, and very strange. Jeff Wise of Popular Mechanics writes about it absolutely brilliantly here. It's really worth ten minutes of your day.

It's too awful to give you a photograph of the wreckage, so here is a happier snap by Robert Doisneau:

Wednesday, 7 December 2011

Paul Krugman, being asked by Christiane Amanpour about Newt
Gingrich, said that ‘somebody said ‘he’s a stupid man’s idea of what a smart
person sounds like’.

I wish I knew who that somebody was. She or he was right on
the money. The common wisdom among the American media seems to be that Newt
Gingrich is an intellectual. I never saw anyone less interested in the free
play of ideas, and with less intellectual discipline. I have never heard him
say a brilliant thing, and I watch a lot of American political television.

Maybe the oddest and most stupid thing he ever said was that
the only way to understand President Obama was to look to that famous Kenyan
model:

‘What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only
if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece
together [his actions]?” Gingrich asks. “That is the most accurate, predictive
model for his behavior.”’

This is an almost meaningless string of words. It is
unmoored from reality on about four different levels. Obama was born in Hawaii,
of an American mother and a Kenyan father, spent some of his childhood in Indonesia, went
to university at Harvard and Columbia, and taught law at the University of
Chicago. From this, the famous intellectual concludes that he must be a Mau Mau.

I always like to put a photograph with each post, and so was looking for one of Paul Krugman (too much to see the wide face of Newt). Instead, I came across this beauty, which has nothing to do with anything, but is so lovely I thought I'd put it up anyway. Sadly, it is completely uncredited, so I have no idea of its date, provenance, or artist.

What do you think? Paris? Some time in the late fifties? If it turns out to be a really famous picture by Brassai, I shall feel quite ashamed that I did not know that.

As I was typing my main blog today, I accidentally wrote the
word ‘forgiveness’ as ‘forgivement’. This is unusual. I am a fairly fast and
accurate typist, thanks to the course I took a hundred years ago in a tiny,
airless room in South Molton Street. (Young People: if you do one thing in your
life, learn to touch-type. One of the best things I ever did.)

As I deleted the offending letters, I suddenly thought
forgivement was rather a wonderful word. It sounded faintly Shakespearean, or
even biblical. The forgivement of sins has a splendid ring.

As always, when I stumble upon, or, as in this case, create a
neologism, I rushed to The Google to look it up. Chances were, it was a word
after all, one of those ones that has arc. for archaic after it in the
dictionary. It could have been one of those ones that went out of fashion in
1760, as some words do. (It wasn't.)

This kind of thing always amuses me. The British rather love
to mock the American pronunciation of herb as erb. (Don’t even get us started
on the correct stress for oregano.) There is a naughty snobbism among Britons
about The Queen’s English, which we were speaking before America was even
invented; a sense of ownership, as if our use of it is the only correct one,
and our cousins across the pond are just bowdlerising the hell out of it.

But
I read somewhere that erb is indeed an original Scottish pronunciation, from
some time in the 17th century, or something of the sort. I may be wrong about that. Certainly in 1911, Edith Nesbitt was writing of 'an herb', which suggest that in England at that time the h was silent, just as in 'an hotel' which is what both my grandmothers called a place to stay. (Some people, even now, talk of 'an historian', with the silent h. So that in strict pedantic terms, there is a chance that people in Boston, Massachusetts are more strictly correct than those in Boston,
Lancashire.

Anyway, forgivement is my word for the day, because it is
what I must ask of you. I have been away from home for over a month, and in
that time, let this fledgling blog shamefully lapse. I barely had the minutes
to write my main blog, let alone pay attention to this smaller enterprise.

But I am back, and I hope that the readers will come back
with me, and forgive the vacancy.

I was looking for an appropriate picture, and found this lovely one:

It was taken in Barcelona by J. Salmoral, and appears on his Flickr page.